A PlayStation Disc Is Yours. The Game Is Licensed.

本文另有中文版：PlayStation 光碟版你擁有的是那一片，數位版連那一片都沒有：Sony 條款信、耗盡原則與四個法域的規定

Pay the same price for a PlayStation game on disc and as a download, and only one of those purchases is fully yours to resell or lend out. That gap surfaced again in late August 2026. PlayStation LifeStyle senior editor Zarmena Khan reported on August 24 that, over the preceding weekend, Sony Interactive Entertainment “sent out emails to players covering updated PlayStation terms for its games and services.” By the writer’s own account, “only players with accounts in Europe and the U.K. (myself included) received the email.” GamesRadar+‘s Anna Koselke, covering the same email, described it as lengthy and largely a copy of Sony’s Terms of Service, and singled out one detail: digital purchases can be rescinded, “even those you paid for.”

Both writers quoted the same core line from the terms attached to that email: “The software is licensed to you, not sold.” That sentence, where it comes from, when it was written, and what it actually changes about owning a PlayStation game, is worth tracing back to the source documents.

Section 1.4 of the Software EULA: “Licensed to You, Not Sold”

The current PlayStation® Software Application End User Licence Agreement (“Software Terms”) is published at Ver. 1.0 with no listed last-updated date. Its opening paragraph sets the scope: the terms cover any game software “offered by SIE … for any format, or by any other publisher for an authorised PlayStation system, including any patches, updates, downloadable content …” That phrase, for any format, means the clause that follows applies to disc-based games exactly as it applies to downloads. Section 1.4, “The Licence to you,” reads in full:

The Software is licenced to you, not sold. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal licence to play or use the Software for your private, non-commercial use on the system or device it was intended for. This licence is only effective from the indicated Software release date, early access date, or beta release date. Any rights in the Software that we do not say are granted to you in this licence are reserved, including all intellectual property in the Software.

That paragraph is followed by a list of prohibited uses — among them, that a buyer must not “rent, lease, or sublicense the Software” without SIE’s prior written consent. The UK edition of the EULA spells the word licenced; the US edition of the same clause spells it licensed. Because the scope clause covers any format, this section is not where the disc and the download diverge. The difference is elsewhere, and comes later in this piece.

”Licensed, Not Sold” Dates to March 2026; “Do Not Acquire Ownership” Dates to 2017

Sony’s own archive page lists five versions of the Software EULA: October 2017, December 2019, October 2020, January 2023, and March 2026. A separate archive page for the PlayStation Terms of Service lists seven versions, the latest also dated March 2026. The pre-2026 document carried a different name, Software Usage Terms, and its December 2022 (v2) edition, Section 4.1, read:

When you purchase Software, you are granted a licence to use that Software as described in these Terms, but you do not acquire ownership of the Software.

The same sentence — you do not acquire ownership of the Software — appears in the October 2017, December 2019, and October 2020 PDFs of that document as well. In other words, the fact that buying software does not mean owning it has been part of Sony’s terms since at least October 2017. What changed in March 2026 was the wording: licensed to you, not sold replaced do not acquire ownership as the operative phrase, in a differently named and differently structured document.

The changeover can be bracketed but not pinned to an exact day. The Wayback Machine’s archive of the UK terms URL still showed the old Software Usage Terms page on March 5, 2026; by April 4, 2026, the same URL redirected to a new address, /legal/software-eula/, already showing Ver. 1.0 with Section 1.4 in place. The US edition’s earliest captured page, from March 18, 2026, was already on the new version. Every capture between April 4 and August 12, 2026 shows no further change to the operative text. Sony’s own archive page carries no separate change-notice document explaining the switch.

What a Disc Adds: A Physical Copy You Own

Section 1.4’s licence language is shared by the disc and the download; the disc does not get a different clause. What the disc adds is something the licence text does not mention: a physical copy that a buyer owns outright. That distinction is the hinge the rest of this piece turns on.

Several jurisdictions tie the right to resell or lend a game to owning that physical object, not to having paid for the software inside it. Taiwan’s Copyright Act, Article 59-1, reads: 在中華民國管轄區域內取得著作原件或其合法重製物所有權之人，得以移轉所有權之方式散布之 — roughly, a person who has acquired ownership of the original work or a lawful copy within Taiwan’s jurisdiction may distribute it by transferring that ownership. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in 2012, in UsedSoft v Oracle, that an author of software cannot oppose the resale of his ‘used’ licences allowing the use of his programs downloaded from the internet — but that ruling applies only to computer programs under the EU’s Software Directive. The same court went the other way in 2019 for e-books: in Tom Kabinet, it held that a permanent download of an e-book counts as ‘communication to the public’, a right that is not subject to exhaustion. France’s Cour de cassation went further still on October 23, 2024 (No. 23-13.738), in the Valve (Steam) case brought by UFC-Que Choisir, ruling definitively that a video game is not simply a computer program: un jeu vidéo n’est pas un programme informatique à part entière mais une œuvre complexe — a video game is not a computer program in its own right but a complex work — and so only the EU’s 2001 copyright directive applies, not the one that carries exhaustion.

Japan and Korea draw the same line around a physical or reproduced object. Japan’s Copyright Act, Article 26-2, gives an author the exclusive right to offer a work to the public by transferring its original or a reproduction, and its exhaustion provision, in paragraph 2, is limited to an original or reproduction already transferred to the public with the rightsholder’s consent. Korea’s Copyright Act, Article 20, gives an author the right to distribute the original or a copy of a work, with the same carve-out once that original or copy has already been sold with the rightsholder’s permission. Korea’s Supreme Court applied that exhaustion rule on December 7, 2023, but the case concerned parallel-imported physical toy blocks, not a digital product.

Outside the French ruling, no court in these five jurisdictions has directly decided whether a digital game can be resold; the statutes were written around a physical or reproduced object from the start, and digital purchases simply fall outside what they describe.

There is a separate point worth making explicit here: the ability to resell or lend a disc comes from statutory exhaustion, not from anything Sony’s contract grants. Sony’s own older terms went the other way. Section 7.1 of the October 2017 Software Usage Terms read: “You must not resell either Disc-based Software or Digital Software, unless expressly authorised by us.” The December 2022 (v2) edition carried the same restriction, worded for “disc-based games or digital games.” A search of the current March 2026 EULA turns up no instance of the words resell or resale at all; Section 1.4(a) only bars renting, leasing, or sublicensing. Whether that old contractual restriction could ever have overridden a buyer’s statutory exhaustion right is not something the sources here settle — what can be said is that Sony’s own contract once tried to block resale outright, and the current version has dropped that language.

The Rest of the Software Terms: Updates, Virtual Content, and Termination

Beyond Section 1.4, several other clauses shape how much control a buyer actually keeps. Section 3.2.2 states that software is licensed “on these Software Terms; it is not sold for you to own,” and that Sony may end the online features of software that uses online servers, with “reasonable advance notice”; if online services end, offline modes remain available only where Sony provides them, and are not guaranteed. Section 3.2.1 allows Sony to modify software beyond what is needed for contractual conformity if there is a “valid reason,” and lists five: fixing bugs, security, adapting to a new system or technical environment, general improvement (including changing in-game rewards), and — the fifth ground — “to adapt to a change in market conditions (for example, a change in number of users) and/or to ensure the commercial viability of the Software.” Section 4.2 states that virtual content is “licenced, not owned,” and that Sony can end a buyer’s access to it if the buyer breaches the terms, if the associated account is closed or suspended, or if the software itself is modified under Section 3.2 in a way that discontinues the content; the same section adds that virtual-content purchases “may be non-refundable.” Section 5, set in capital letters, states that Sony may stop supporting or discontinue the software at any time and end online services without liability to the buyer, which may mean losing access to gameplay, progression, or virtual content. Section 8.4.2 promises “reasonable notice” of changes to the terms — 30 days before they take effect is given as an example.

An older edition of the same document, from October 2020 and again in the December 2022 (v2) text, made a related point about server shutdowns more plainly, saying online services “are not provided for ever” and that Sony applies what it called its Guiding Principles when deciding to end one, with advance notice.

The EU’s Directive (EU) 2019/770, Article 19, governs when a business can modify digital content it supplies on an ongoing basis: the contract must allow the change and give a valid reason for it, the change must be free, clearly communicated, and if it negatively affects the buyer’s use in more than a minor way, the buyer can terminate the contract within 30 days. Section 3.2.1’s own “valid reason” language corresponds to that directive’s wording; nothing beyond that correspondence is sourced here.

A separate, consolidated document, the PlayStation Terms of Service (Version 12, last updated April 2026), covers the purchase transaction itself. Its Section 13.5 states:

You buy a personal licence to use Digital Products for private use. Your licence to use Digital Products is not transferrable unless your local applicable laws say it must be. This means you can use a Digital Product in the ways described in the licence but you do not own the Digital Product.

The same document’s Section 21.2 allows Sony to close an account after 36 months of inactivity, but only after emailing the account holder and giving six months to respond.

Peer Platforms Use Similar Wording, With Different Disclosure

Sony is not the only platform whose terms describe games as licensed rather than owned. The wording across major storefronts:

Steam’s own agreement, last updated April 20, 2026, states plainly that its content and services “are licensed, not sold,” with a license conferring “no title or ownership.” Since October 2024, Valve has also added a checkout-page notice — “A purchase of a digital product grants a license for the product on Steam” — timed to California’s AB 2426, signed by Governor Newsom on September 26, 2024. Nintendo’s US Switch 2 agreement uses near-identical phrasing, and separately warns that unauthorized modification can render the console or software “permanently unusable in whole or in part,” a console-level consequence the EU version of Nintendo’s account terms does not carry. Microsoft’s Xbox terms and Epic’s Games Store EULA use the same or close-to-identical phrasing. Google Play’s terms are the outlier: they never use the phrase “licensed, not sold” at all, instead granting a non-exclusive right to store, access, and display copies. GOG’s terms are licence-based like the rest; its difference is that it supplies offline installer files. Across all eight, none was found to describe a purchase as conferring ownership of the game.

Four Jurisdictions at a Glance

United States (California): AB 2426’s Disclosure Rule, and the Garcia Lawsuit

California’s AB 2426, signed in 2024 and effective January 1, 2025, added Section 17500.6 to the state’s Business and Professions Code. It makes it unlawful for a seller to advertise or offer for sale a digital good using the terms “buy,” “purchase,” “or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good,” unless the seller either obtains an affirmative acknowledgment at the time of purchase — stating, among other things, “That the purchaser is receiving a license to access the digital good” — or gives a clear, conspicuous pre-purchase statement that “buying” or “purchasing” the good is a license, linked to full terms. The law exempts subscription services, free goods, and any digital good the seller cannot revoke after the transaction, including one made available for permanent offline download to external storage.

On June 18, 2026, four California consumers filed Garcia v. Sony Interactive Entertainment, LLC in the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:26-cv-06016), alleging that PlayStation Store buttons like “Buy Now” and “Confirm Purchase” convey ownership when what a buyer actually gets is a revocable license. The complaint raises three causes of action: Section 17500.6, California’s False Advertising Law, and the Consumers Legal Remedies Act. According to a class-action tracking site and an Aftermath report, Sony’s own checkout page already carries a disclosure: “You further acknowledge that your purchase of this digital product amounts to a license subject to the Software Product License Agreement.” The case has not been certified as a class action, and there is no ruling yet.

A comparable case against Ubisoft over The Crew, a game that was shut down, has already settled: a $2 million fund, with a final approval hearing set for November 13, 2026 (Ubisoft’s broader corporate situation is covered separately, in Chinese, here). As of this writing, no court or regulator has been found ruling that a digital game buyer owns their purchase, or requiring any platform to allow resale.

The European Union: Directive 2019/770, and the Commission’s Reply to a Keep-Games-Playable Petition

Article 19 of Directive (EU) 2019/770, described above, governs modifications to ongoing digital content. A separate track runs through a European Citizens’ Initiative, Stop Destroying Videogames, which cleared the ECI signature threshold and was submitted to the European Commission on January 26, 2026, asking for a legal obligation on publishers to keep games playable after they stop being provided commercially. The Commission’s formal reply, dated June 16, 2026, does three things: first, it states that, at this stage, it “cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially”; second, it will start talks with industry and consumer representatives by the end of 2026 toward an industry code of conduct on managing a game’s “end of life”; third, it plans to publish, also by the end of 2026, its report on how Directive 2019/770 applies, including to the discontinuation of digital content and services. The same reply document also relays the UK government’s own 2025 response to a related petition, stating that ‘there are no plans to amend UK consumer law on disabling video games’, adding that “those selling games must comply with existing requirements in consumer law and we will continue to monitor this issue.”

Taiwan: Copyright Exhaustion Covers a Physical Copy, Not a Download

Taiwan’s Copyright Act, Article 59-1, ties exhaustion to ownership of a lawful copy, and a digital download involves no transfer of ownership of any object. The Consumer Protection Act’s Article 19 gives buyers a seven-day withdrawal right for mail-order and door-to-door transactions, but the regulation governing reasonable exceptions to that right, Article 2, item 5, exempts digital content provided without a tangible medium, or an online service completed the moment it is delivered, where the consumer has agreed to that in advance — an exception that has applied unchanged since it took effect on January 1, 2016.

The Ministry of Digital Affairs’ standard-form contract rules for connected online games apply narrowly: they cover games that connect over the internet to a server designated by the operator, and explicitly exclude 「單純區域連線或其他無需透過網路連結遊戲伺服器之遊戲服務」 — roughly, purely local connections or other game services that do not require connecting to a game server over the internet — meaning a standalone downloaded game is not automatically covered. Where the rules do apply, they require at least 30 days’ notice before a shutdown and a refund of unused points without deducting cost; they also state, 「本遊戲之所有電磁紀錄均屬企業經營者所有」，「消費者對於前項電磁紀錄有使用支配之權利。但不包括本遊戲服務範圍外之移轉、收益行為。」 — roughly, all electromagnetic records of the game belong to the operator, and the consumer has the right of use and control over those records, but this does not extend to any transfer or profit-taking activity outside the scope of the game’s service.

A Taipei District Court ruling, Case No. 114-Su-3944 (April 30, 2026, first instance), dismissed a plaintiff’s claim for NT$4.5 million after their top-up mobile game shut down. The court cited a contract clause: 「乙方（即被告）遊戲中之虛擬物品（包括但不限於金幣、金鑽、道具、裝備等），其所有權歸乙方所有。甲方（即原告）只能在合乎法律和本約之情況下擁有對虛擬物品的使用權」 — roughly, ownership of the virtual items in the game (including but not limited to coins, gems, items, and equipment) belongs to the operator (defendant); the player (plaintiff) only holds a right of use over those items, subject to law and the contract — and found the shutdown, announced 30 days in advance as the contract required, lawful. The case is a first-instance ruling about a top-up mobile game that ceased operating; it does not decide anything about PlayStation’s digital games specifically. No Taiwanese law or ruling was found stating that buying a digital game confers ownership, and Taiwan has no dedicated statute addressing digital-licence disclosure.

Japan: Two Separate Rules — Copyright Exhaustion and Prepaid-Balance Refunds

Japan’s Copyright Act, Article 26-2, gives an author the exclusive right to offer a work to the public by transferring 「その原作品又は複製物」 — roughly, its original or a reproduction; paragraph 2 exempts from that right any original or reproduction already transferred to the public with the rightsholder’s consent — exhaustion, tied to that same original-or-reproduction object.

A separate line runs through the Payment Services Act, which governs prepaid currency rather than the software itself. Article 20, paragraph 1, requires an issuer of a prepaid payment instrument to refund a holder’s balance if the issuer discontinues that instrument, in whole or in part. Sony’s Japanese-language page on payment-services disclosures states, for each of its in-game currencies: 「本前払式支払手段の取扱いを廃止する場合を除き、払戻しはいたしません」 — roughly, except where we discontinue this prepaid payment instrument, we will not issue refunds. These two rules are not the same line: copyright exhaustion governs whether a software reproduction can be resold, while the Payment Services Act governs whether a prepaid balance gets refunded, and one cannot be read as the reason for the other.

A third, separate provision, the Specified Commercial Transactions Act, Article 15-3, gives a mail-order buyer the right to withdraw from or cancel a purchase within 「商品の引渡し又は特定権利の移転を受けた日から起算して八日」 — roughly, eight days of receiving the goods or the transferred right — unless the seller advertised an exception to that right in the same advertisement. No Japanese court ruling or Consumer Affairs Agency statement was found holding that buying a digital game confers ownership or a use right beyond the licence.

Korea: Same Distribution-Right Wording, a Physical-Goods Case

Korea’s Copyright Act, Article 20, gives an author the right to distribute 「저작물의 원본이나 그 복제물」 — roughly, the original or a copy of a work — with an exception once that original or copy has already been put into commerce with the rightsholder’s permission. Korea’s Supreme Court applied that exhaustion rule on December 7, 2023, holding: 「이미 거래에 제공된 저작물의 원본이나 그 복제물은 그 이후에는 자유롭게 유통될 필요가 있으므로 해당 저작물의 원본이나 그 복제물에 대한 배포권은 그 목적을 달성하여 소진된다」 — roughly, once the original or a copy of a work has been put into commerce, it needs to circulate freely afterward, so the distribution right over that original or copy is exhausted once it has served its purpose. The case concerned parallel-imported physical toy blocks, not a digital product. No Supreme Court-level ruling was found treating a game account or in-game item as property, and Korea has no dedicated statute addressing digital-licence disclosure.

January 2028: New PlayStation Games Stop Coming on Disc

On July 1, 2026, PlayStation.Blog published an announcement from Sid Shuman, Senior Director of Sony Interactive Entertainment Content Communications: “physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only.” The stated reason is that “the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs.” The scope is limited to new games releasing from January 2028 onward; the same post adds that the change has no impact on games released, or releasing, on disc before January 2028.

The same day, independent retailer PNP Games started a Change.org petition, “Don’t Kill the Disc,” calling on Sony to keep physical PlayStation games available; by August 25, 2026, the petition page showed 372,866 verified signatures. Sony CFO Lin Tao addressed the disc issue at the company’s July 31, 2026 earnings call, through an interpreter; one line from that answer: “At this point in time, we are not seeing any impact on our business.” DoesItPlay, a game-preservation community, posted on Bluesky on August 23, 2026 calling for a week-long #PSBlackout running through August 30, writing: “No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony’s platforms.”

Sony’s terms email, the disc announcement, the Change.org petition, #PSBlackout, and the Garcia lawsuit all sit on the same stretch of calendar. That is a timeline, not a chain of cause and effect:

Bringing this back to the original question: from January 2028, new PlayStation games will no longer come on disc, and with them goes the option of buying the one thing that carries exhaustion rights under all five bodies of law above — a physical copy a buyer owns. The licence text itself has not changed. What is changing is whether there is still a copy to buy.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What do you legally own when you buy a digital PlayStation game? Under Section 1.4 of the Software EULA, a buyer gets a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal licence to play or use the software, not ownership of it. Section 4.2 states that in-game virtual content is licensed the same way, not owned. Sony is not alone in this wording: Steam, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Epic all use “licensed, not sold” or close variants in their own terms.

Q: What does a PlayStation disc actually add that a download does not? The software licence itself is the same either way. What the disc adds is a physical copy a buyer legally owns. Taiwan’s Copyright Act, EU Court of Justice rulings, France’s top court, Japan’s Copyright Act, and Korea’s Copyright Act all tie the right to resell or lend a copy to owning that physical object, not to having paid for the software. A digital copy has no such object, so exhaustion has nothing to attach to.

Q: What changes for PlayStation buyers starting in January 2028? Sony will stop producing physical discs for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles from January 2028 onward; those titles will be sold only through the PlayStation Store and digital retail. The licence terms themselves are not changing. What disappears for those new titles is the option of buying a physical copy at all.

Q: Did Sony’s August 2026 email change the PlayStation licence terms? No. The email was a full-text copy of Sony’s PlayStation terms; the licence line quoted from it comes from the Software EULA, which was last revised in March 2026, months before the email went out. Sony’s own version-history page shows no separate change notice tied to the email, and PlayStation LifeStyle’s own reporting notes the terms themselves are not new.